Category Archives: environment

Hand-washing and drying–the right way–can save your life

Posted on February 27, 2020 | 1 comment

The flu has hit the U.S., and hit it hard.  We’ve already seen flu-related deaths.  And now we confront a serious new threat, the coronavirus.

There’s no guarantee that this year’s flu vaccine is as effective as we would like, and right now we have no vaccine or other medical means to avoid the coronavirus.  So we need to employ other ways to contain the spread of the flu and other dangerous infections.

One simple way to foil all of these infections is to wash our hands often, and to do it right.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have cautioned that to avoid the flu, we should “stay away from sick people,” adding it’s “also important to wash hands often with soap and water.”

On February 9 of this year, The New York Times repeated this message, noting that “[h]ealth professionals say washing hands with soap and water is the most effective line of defense against colds, flu and other illnesses.”  In the fight against the coronavirus, the CDC has once again reminded us of the importance of hand-washing, stating that it “can reduce the risk of respiratory infections by 16 percent.”

BUT one aspect of hand-washing is frequently overlooked:  Once we’ve washed our hands, how do we dry them?

The goal of hand-washing is to stop the spread of bacteria and viruses.  But when we wash our hands in public places, we don’t always encounter the best way to dry them. 

Restaurants, stores, theaters, museums, and other institutions offering restrooms for their patrons generally confront us with only one way to dry our hands:  paper towels OR air blowers.  A few establishments offer both, giving us a choice, but most do not.

I’m a strong proponent of paper towels, and my position has garnered support from an epidemiologist at the Mayo Clinic, Rodney Lee Thompson.

According to a story in The Wall Street Journal a few years ago, the Mayo Clinic published a comprehensive study of every known hand-washing study done since 1970.  The conclusion?  Drying one’s skin is essential to staving off bacteria, and paper towels are better at that than air blowers.

Why?  Paper towels are more efficient, they don’t splatter germs, they won’t dry out your skin, and most people prefer them (and therefore are more likely to wash their hands in the first place).

Thompson’s own study was included in the overall study, and he concurred with its conclusions.  He observed people washing their hands at places like sports stadiums.  “The trouble with blowers,” he said, is that “they take so long.”  Most people dry their hands for a short time, then “wipe them on their dirty jeans, or open the door with their still-wet hands.”

Besides being time-consuming, most blowers are extremely noisy.  Their decibel level can be deafening.  Like Thompson, I think these noisy and inefficient blowers “turn people off.”

But there’s “no downside to the paper towel,” either psychologically or environmentally.  Thompson stated that electric blowers use more energy than producing a paper towel, so they don’t appear to benefit the environment either.

The air-blower industry argues that blowers reduce bacterial transmission, but studies show that the opposite is true.  These studies found that blowers tend to spread bacteria from 3 to 6 feet.  To keep bacteria from spreading, Thompson urged using a paper towel to dry your hands, opening the restroom door with it, then throwing it into the trash.

An episode of the TV series “Mythbusters” provided additional evidence to support Thompson’s conclusions.  The results of tests conducted on this program, aired in 2013, demonstrated that paper towels are more effective at removing bacteria from one’s hands and that air blowers spread more bacteria around the blower area.

In San Francisco, where I live, many restrooms have posted signs stating that they’re composting paper towels to reduce waste.  So, because San Francisco has an ambitious composting scheme, we’re not adding paper towels to our landfills or recycling bins.  Other cities may already be doing the same, and still others will undoubtedly follow.

Because I strongly advocate replacing air blowers with paper towels in public restrooms, I think our political leaders should pay attention to this issue.  If they conclude, as overwhelming evidence suggests, that paper towels are better both for our health and for the environment, they can enact local ordinances requiring that public restrooms use paper towels instead of air blowers.  State legislation would lead to an even better outcome.

A transition period would allow the temporary use of blowers until paper towels could be installed.

If you agree with this position, we can ourselves take action by asking those who manage the restrooms we frequent to adopt the use of paper towels, if they haven’t done so already.

Paper towels or air blowers?  The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.  The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

 

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Posted in bacteria, Centers for Disease Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), composting, coronavirus, disease, environment, hand-drying, hand-washing, medical research, paper towels, public restrooms

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Coal: A Personal History

Posted on January 29, 2020 | 2 comments

It’s January, and much of the country is confronting freezing temperatures, snow, and ice.  I live in San Francisco now, but I vividly remember what life is like in cold-weather climates.

When I was growing up on the North Side of Chicago, my winter garb followed this pattern:

Skirt and blouse, socks (usually short enough to leave my legs largely bare), a woolen coat, and a silk scarf for my head.  Under my coat, I might have added a cardigan sweater.  But during the freezing cold days of winter (nearly every day during a normal Chicago winter), I was always COLD—when I was outside, that is.

My parents were caring and loving, but they followed the norms of most middle-class parents in Chicago during that era.  No one questioned this attire.  I recall shivering whenever our family ventured outside for a special event during the winter.  I especially remember the excitement of going downtown to see the first showing of Disney’s “Cinderella.”  Daddy parked our Chevy at an outdoor parking lot blocks from the theater on State Street, and we bravely faced the winter winds as we made our way there on foot.  I remember being COLD.

School days were somewhat different.  On bitter cold days, girls were allowed to cover our legs, but only if we hung our Levi’s in our lockers when we arrived at school.  We may have added mufflers around our heads and necks to create just a little more warmth as we walked blocks and blocks to school in the morning, back home for lunch, then returning to school for the afternoon.

Looking back, I can’t help wondering why it never occurred to our parents to clothe us more warmly.  Weren’t they aware of the warmer winter clothing worn elsewhere?  One reason that we didn’t adopt warmer winter garb–like thermal underwear, or down jackets, or ski parkas–may have been a lack of awareness that they existed.  Or the answer may have been even simpler:  the abundance of coal.

Inside, we were never cold.  Why?  Because heating with coal was ubiquitous.  It heated our apartment buildings, our houses, our schools, our stores, our movie theaters, our libraries, our public buildings, and almost everywhere else.  Radiators heated by coal hissed all winter long.  The result?  Overheated air.

Despite the bleak winter outside, inside I was never cold.  On the contrary, I was probably much too warm in the overheated spaces we inhabited.

Until I was 12, we lived in an apartment with lots of windows.  In winter the radiators were always blazing hot, so hot that we never felt the cold air outside.  The window glass would be covered in condensed moisture, a product of the intensely heated air, and I remember drawing funny faces on the glass that annoyed my scrupulous-housekeeper mother.

Where did all that heat come from?  I never questioned its ultimate source.

I later learned that it was extracted from deep beneath the earth.  But what happened to it above ground was no secret.  More than once, I watched trucks pull up outside my apartment building to deliver large quantities of coal.  The driver would set up a chute that sent the coal directly into the basement, where all those lumps of coal must have been shoveled into a big furnace.

Coal was the primary source of heat back then, and the environment suffered as a result.  After the coal was burned in the furnace, its ashes would be shoveled into bags.  Many of the ashes found their way into the environment.  They were, for example, used on pavements and streets to cope with snow and ice.

The residue from burning coal also led to other harmful results.  Every chimney spewed thick sooty smoke all winter, sending into the air the toxic particles that we all inhaled.

Coal was plentiful, cheap, and reliable.  And few people were able to choose alternatives like fireplaces and wood-burning furnaces (which presented their own problems).

Eventually, cleaner and more easily distributed forms of heating fuel displaced coal.  Residential use dropped, and according to one source, today it amounts to less than one percent of heating fuel.

But coal still plays a big part in our lives.  As Malcolm Turnbull, the former prime minister of Australia (which is currently suffering the consequences of climate change), wrote earlier this month in TIME magazine, the issue of “climate action” has been “hijacked by a toxic, climate-denying alliance of right-wing politics and media…, as well as vested business interests, especially in the coal industry.”  He added:  “Above all, we have to urgently stop burning coal and other fossil fuels.”

In her book Inconspicuous Consumption: the environmental impact you don’t know you have, Tatiana Schlossberg points out that we still get about one-third of our electricity from coal.  So “streaming your online video may be coal-powered.”  Using as her source a 2014 EPA publication, she notes that coal ash remains one of the largest industrial solid-waste streams in the country, largely under-regulated, ending up polluting groundwater, streams, lakes, and rivers across the country.

“As crazy as this might sound,” Schlossberg writes, watching your favorite episode of “The Office” might come at the expense of clean water for someone else.  She’s concerned that even though we know we need electricity to power our computers, we don’t realize that going online itself uses electricity, which often comes from fossil fuels.

Illinois is finally dealing with at least one result of its longtime dependence on coal.   Environmental groups like Earthjustice celebrated a big win in Illinois in 2019 when they helped win passage of milestone legislation strengthening rules for cleaning up the state’s coal-ash dumps.  In a special report, Earthjustice noted that coal ash, the toxic residue of burning coal, has been dumped nationwide into more than 1,000 unlined ponds and landfills, where it leaches into waterways and drinking water.

Illinois in particular has been severely impacted by coal ash.  It is belatedly overhauling its legacy of toxic coal waste and the resulting widespread pollution in groundwater near its 24 coal-ash dumpsites.  The new legislation funds coal-ash cleanup programs and requires polluters to set aside funds to ensure that they, not taxpayers, pay for closure and cleanup of coal-ash dumps.

Earthjustice rightfully trumpets its victory, which will now protect Illinois residents and its waters from future toxic pollution by coal ash.  But what about the legacy of the past, and what about the legacy of toxic coal particles that entered the air decades ago?

As an adult, I wonder about the huge quantities of coal dust I must have inhaled during every six-month-long Chicago winter that I lived through as a child.  I appear to have so far escaped adverse health consequences, but that could change at any time.

And I wonder about others in my generation.  How many of us have suffered or will suffer serious health problems as a result of drinking polluted water and inhaling toxic coal-dust particles?

I suspect that many in my generation have been unwilling victims of our decades-long dependence on coal.

 

 

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Posted in 1950s, blue jeans, Chicago, climate change, coal, coal ash, coal dust, cold weather, disease, Earthjustice, energy consumption, environment, family, feeling cold, health, housekeeping, Illinois, jeans, Levi's, memories, parents, pollution, San Francisco, toxic air and water, weather, winter weather

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How about Thanks AND Giving?

Posted on November 25, 2019 | Leave a comment

I was scanning the aisles at Trader Joe’s when I noticed one of its 99-cent greeting cards.

The message caught my eye:  “Let our lives be full of BOTH Thanks & Giving.”

It struck me as the perfect card for the Thanksgiving holiday.  I grabbed it and carried it off with the rest of my purchases, planning to bestow it on a loved one at our annual feast.

But while the card patiently awaits its presentation on the holiday, the message has stayed with me.  What better sentiment to express at this time of year?

Just when Thanksgiving is on our minds, we’re inundated by pleas for money from a variety of causes.  At the same time, we want to give holiday presents to loved ones, friends, and acquaintances.

My proposal:  Let’s focus on both giving thanks and just plain giving.

So, as we celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday this week, I’m keeping both in mind.

First, let’s give thanks for all of the good things in our lives.  If you have any of the following, you’re lucky indeed and should feel grateful:  Loving family, good health, caring friends, cheerful acquaintances, some degree of success in your profession or work of any kind, and achievement of (or progress toward) whatever goals you may have.

Next, if you’re financially able to assist a good cause (or many), this is a splendid time of year to send them gifts.  For most charitable and other good causes, a monetary gift in almost any amount is welcome.  So please think about opening your wallet, your checkbook, or your online ability to send funds, and make a gift to show that you support these groups.

You can also scour your home and donate usable items you no longer need to worthy groups that will pass them on to others.

Finally, giving presents to those you love and care about may also be important to you.  But try to keep the health of our planet in mind when you choose those gifts.

Good karma will come to you.  Or so I like to think.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

.

 

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Posted in American culture, charities, donations to charity, environment, family, friends, Good karma, gratitude, happiness, holidays, love, plastic pollution, Thanksgiving

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My Life as a Shopper

Posted on September 28, 2019 | 1 comment

I have a new outlook on shopping.  I’m no longer shopping the way I used to.

Why?

I’ll start at the beginning.  My long history of shopping began when I was very young.

My parents were both immersed in retailing.  My mother’s parents immigrated to Chicago from Eastern Europe and, soon after arriving, opened a clothing store on Milwaukee Avenue.  Their enterprise evolved into a modest chain of women’s apparel stores, and throughout her life my mother was intimately involved in the business.  She embedded in me the ethos that shopping for new things, especially clothes, was a good thing.  Under her influence, I gave away countless wearable items of clothing in favor of getting something new, preferably something sold in one of her family’s stores.  (I later regretted departing with some of the perfectly good items I could have continued to wear for many more years.)

Even though my father received a degree in pharmacy from the University of Illinois, and he enjoyed some aspects of his work as a pharmacist, he was himself attracted to retailing.  At a young age, he opened his own drugstore on the South Side of Chicago (I treasure a black-and-white photo of him standing in front of his store’s window).  After marrying my mother, he spent a number of years working in her family’s business, and in the late ‘40s the two of them opened a women’s clothing boutique on Rush Street, a short distance from Oak Street, in a soon-to-be-trendy shopping area.  Ahead of its time, the boutique quickly folded, but Daddy never lost his taste for retailing.

In view of this history, I was fated to become a “shopper.”  After Daddy died when I was 12, our family wasn’t able to spend big wads of money on anything, including clothes.  But my mother’s inclination to buy new clothes never really ceased.

Thanks to generous scholarship and fellowship awards, I made my way through college and grad school on a miniscule budget.  I saved money by spending almost nothing, savoring the 99-cent dinner at Harkness Commons almost every night during law school to save money.  And because I began my legal career with a $6,000 annual salary as a federal judge’s law clerk and, as a lawyer, never pursued a high-paying job (I preferred to work on behalf of the poor, for example), I got by without big-time shopping.

Marriage brought little change at first.  My darling new husband also came from a modest background and was not a big spender, even when our salaries began to move up a bit.

But things eventually changed.  Higher salaries and the arrival of new retail chain stores featuring bargain prices made buying stuff much more tempting.  I needed presentable clothes for my new full-time jobs.  Our daughters needed to be garbed in clothes like those the other kids wore.  Our living room chairs from Sears began to look shabby, propelling us toward somewhat better home décor.

A raft of other changes led me to spend more time shopping.  My boring law-firm jobs were more tolerable if I could escape during my lunch hour and browse at nearby stores.  The rise of outlet malls made bargain shopping easier than ever.  And travels to new cities and countries inspired buying small, easily packable items, like books and jewelry.

After I moved to San Francisco, having jettisoned possessions I’d lived with for years in my former home, I needed to acquire new ones.  So there I was, buying furniture and kitchen equipment for my sunny new apartment.

At the same time, our consumption-driven culture continued to push buying more and more, including the “fast-fashion” that emerged, offering stylish clothes at a temptingly low price.

But this emphasis on acquiring new stuff, even low-priced stuff, has finally lost its appeal.

I’ve come to realize that I don’t need it.

My overall goal is to simplify my life.  This means giving away a lot of things I don’t need, like stacks of books I’ll never read and charming bric-a-brac that’s sitting on a shelf collecting dust.  Like clothes that a disadvantaged person needs more than I do.

My new focus:  First, use what I already have.  Next, do not buy anything new unless I absolutely need it.

Choosing not to acquire new clothes—in essence, reusing what I already have, adopting the slogan “shop your closet”–is a perfect example of my new outlook.

I’ve previously written about confining one’s new purchases to “reunion-worthy” clothes.  [Please see my blog post of October 12, 2017, advising readers to choose their purchases carefully, making sure that any clothes they buy are flattering enough to wear at a school reunion.]

But that doesn’t go far enough.  New purchases should be necessary.

I find that I’m not alone in adopting this approach.

Many millennials have eschewed buying consumer goods, opting for new experiences instead of new material things.  I guess I agree with the millennials’ outlook on this subject.

Here’s other evidence of this approach.  An article in The Guardian in July 2019 shouted “’Don’t feed the monster!’ The people who have stopped buying new clothes.”  Writer Paula Cocozza noted the growing number of people who love clothes but resist buying new ones because of the lack of their sustainability:  Many consumers she interviewed were switching to second-hand shopping so they would not perpetuate this consumption and waste.

Second-hand shopping has even taken off online.  In September, the San Francisco Chronicle noted the “wave of new resale apps and marketplaces” adding to longtime resale giants like eBay.  At the same time, The New York Times, covering Fashion Week in Milan, wrote that there was “a lot of talk about sustainability over the last two weeks of collections, and about fashion’s role in the climate crisis.”  The Times added:  “the idea of creating clothes that last—that people want to buy and actually keep, keep wearing and never throw out, recycle or resell”—had become an important part of that subject.  It quoted Miuccia Prada, doyenne of the high-end clothing firm Prada:  “we need to do less.  There is too much fashion, too much clothes, too much of everything.”

Enter Tatiana Schlossberg and her new book, Inconspicuous consumption:  the environmental impact you don’t know you have (2019).  In the middle of an absorbing chapter titled Fashion, she notes that “There’s something appealing about being able to buy really cheap, fashionable clothing [..,] but it has given us a false sense of inexpensiveness.  It’s not only that the clothes are cheap; it’s that no one is paying for the long-term costs of the waste we create just from buying as much as we can afford….”

Some scholars have specifically focused on this issue, the “overabundance of fast fashion—readily available, inexpensively made new clothing,” because it has created “an environmental and social justice crisis.”  Christine Ekenga, an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has co-authored a paper focused on the “global environmental injustice of fast fashion,” asserting that the fast-fashion supply chain has created a dilemma.  While consumers can buy more clothes for less, those who work in or live near textile-manufacturing bear a disproportionate burden of environmental health hazards.  Further, millions of tons of textile waste sit in landfills and other settings, hurting low-income countries that produce many of these clothes.  In the U.S., about 85 percent of the clothing Americans consume–nearly 80 pounds per American per year–is sent to landfills as solid waste.  [See “The Global Environmental Injustice of Fast Fashion” in the journal Environmental Health.]

A high-profile public figure had an epiphany along the same lines that should influence all of us.  The late Doug Tompkins was one of the founders of The North Face and later moved on to help establish the apparel chain Esprit.  At the height of Esprit’s success, he sold his stake in the company for about $150 million and moved to Chile, where he embraced a whole new outlook on life and adopted an important new emphasis on ecology.  He bought up properties for conservation purposes, in this way “paying my rent for living on the planet.”  Most tellingly, he said, “I left that world of making stuff that nobody really needed because I realized that all of this needless overconsumption is one of the driving forces of the [environmental] crisis, the mother of all crises.”  [Sierra magazine, September/October 2019.]

Author Marie Kondo fits in here.  She has earned fame as a de-cluttering expert, helping people who feel overwhelmed with too much stuff to tidy up their homes.  Her focus is on reducing clutter that’s already there, so she doesn’t zero in on new purchases.  But I applaud her overall outlook.  As part of de-cluttering, she advises:  As you consider keeping or letting go of an item, hold it in your hands and ask:  “Does this item bring me joy?”  This concept of ensuring that an item brings you joy could apply to new purchases as well, so long as the item bringing you joy is also one you really need.

What should those of us enmeshed in our consumer culture do?  In The Wall Street Journal in July 2019, April Lane Benson, a “shopping-addiction-focused psychologist and the author of ‘To Buy or Not to Buy:  Why We Overshop and How to Stop’,” suggested that if a consumer is contemplating a purchase, she should ask herself six simple questions:  “Why am I here? How do I feel? Do I need this? What if I wait? How will I pay for it? Where will I put it?”

Benson’s list of questions is a good one.  Answering them could go a long way toward helping someone avoid making a compulsive purchase.  But let’s remember:  Benson is talking about a shopper already in a store, considering whether to buy something she’s already selected in her search for something new.  How many shoppers will interrupt a shopping trip like that to answer Benson’s questions?

I suggest a much more ambitious scheme:  Simply resolve not to buy anything you don’t need!

My 11-year-old granddaughter has the right idea:  She’s a minimalist who has rejected any number of gifts from me, including some fetching new clothes, telling me she doesn’t need them.

When I reflect on my life as a shopper, I now understand why and how I became the shopper I did.  Perhaps, in light of my family history and the increasingly consumption-driven culture I’ve lived through, I didn’t really have an option.

But I have regrets:  I’ve wasted countless hours browsing in stores, looking through racks and poring over shelves for things to buy, much of which I didn’t need, then spending additional hours returning some of the things I had just purchased.

These are hours I could have spent far more wisely.  Pursuing my creative work, exercising more often and more vigorously, doing more to help those in need.

Readers:  Please don’t make the mistakes I have.  Adopt my new philosophy.  You’ll have many more hours in your life to pursue far more rewarding goals than acquiring consumer goods you don’t really need.

 

 

 

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Posted in American culture, books, Chicago, class reunions, clothes, clothing, clothing, donations to charity, energy consumption, environment, exercise, family, fashion, fashion industry, fathers, grandchildren, Harvard, health benefits of exercise, joy, law school, legal assistance to the poor, lifestyle choices, Mom, parents, pharmacist, reunion-worthy clothes, San Francisco, San Francisco Chronicle, shopping, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, time, travel, Washington University in St. Louis, women workers, women's clothing

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The Old Man and the Movies

Posted on May 28, 2019 | 2 comments

The Sundance Kid rides again!  Not on horseback but in a 1970s sedan.

In his most recent film (and perhaps his last), The Old Man and the Gun, Robert Redford plays a charming real-life bank robber.  Announcing his retirement from acting, he told Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle that he chose the part because he identified with the bank robber’s rebellious spirit, and he wanted his last film to be “quirky and upbeat and fun.”

I have a special fondness for Redford that goes back to his role in his first memorable film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  Redford has called it the “first real film experience I ever had” and “the most fun on any film I’ve had.  It changed my life.”

When I saw the film in Chicago shortly after its release, I was struck by the performances of both Paul Newman (my perennial favorite) as Butch Cassidy and newcomer Redford as the Sundance Kid.

Unbeknown to me, there was a real live double of the Sundance Kid out there, waiting to meet me when I moved to LA a short time later:  my soon-to-be husband.  Once he added a mustache to his otherwise great looks, his resemblance to Redford in that film was uncanny, and I dubbed him the Sundance Kid.  I even acquired a poster of Redford in that role to affix to my office wall as a reminder of my new-found love.

The 1969 film, now fifty years old, holds up very well.  In perhaps its most memorable scene, the two leading men plunge from a cliff into roiling waters below, shouting a now more commonly accepted expletive for probably the first time in movie history.

Newman and Redford play leaders of the “Hole in the Wall Gang,” a group that robs banks, successfully for the most part, until robbing a train gets them into serious trouble.  They alienate Mr. E. H. Harrison of the Union Pacific Railroad, who hires special trackers who relentlessly follow Butch and Sundance.

An endearing scene takes place when the two men approach the home of Etta Place, Sundance’s wife.  News stories have alarmed Etta.  “The papers said they had you.  They said you were dead.”  Sundance’s first reaction:  “Don’t make a big thing of it.”  He pauses and reflects.  Then he says, “No.  Make a big thing of it.”  And they enthusiastically embrace.

Redford’s brilliant career includes a large number of notable Hollywood films.  It’s easy for me to name some favorites:  Downhill Racer in 1969, The Candidate in 1972, The Way We Were and The Sting in 1973, All the President’s Men in 1974, The Natural in 1984, and Out of Africa in 1985.  (A few of these especially resonate with me.)  And in All is Lost, as recently as 2013, Redford shines as an older man on the verge of dying alone in troubled ocean waters. Outstanding performances, each and every one.

In recent years, as I became an active supporter of NRDC (the Natural Resources Defense Council), an entity vigorously working on behalf of the environment, I began hearing from Redford, who aligned himself with NRDC’s goals and requested additional donations.  I commend him for his strong support for protecting the future of our country and our planet.  His efforts on behalf of the environment seem even more critical now, as we face increasingly dire problems caused by climate change.

As for Redford’s movie career, my hope is that he chooses not to retire.  Most movie-goers would welcome seeing new films that include him, even in a small role.  In the meantime, I encourage every film buff to see The Old Man and the Gun.  Featuring a number of brief scenes from his earlier movies (plugged into the movie by director David Lowery), the film is a great reminder of a storied Hollywood career.  A career that began with the Sundance Kid.

 

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Posted in 1969 movies, American culture, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Chicago, climate change, environment, films, Hollywood, Los Angeles, LA, movie stars, movies, Robert Redford, San Francisco Chronicle, The Sundance Kid

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Sunscreen–and a father who cared

Posted on August 27, 2018 | 1 comment

August is on its last legs, but the sun’s rays are still potent. Potent enough to require that we use sunscreen. Especially those of us whose skin is most vulnerable to those rays.

I’ve been vulnerable to the harsh effects of the sun since birth.  And I now apply sunscreen religiously to my face, hands, and arms whenever I expect to encounter sunlight.

When I was younger, sunscreen wasn’t really around.  Fortunately for my skin, I spent most of my childhood and youth in cold-weather climates where the sun was absent much of the year.  Chicago and Boston, even St. Louis, had long winters featuring gray skies instead of sunshine.

I encountered the sun mostly during summers and a seven-month stay in Los Angeles.  But my sun exposure was limited.  It was only when I was about 28 and about to embark on a trip to Mexico that I first heard of “sunblock.”  Friends advised me to seek it out at the only location where it was known to be available, a small pharmacy in downtown Chicago.   I hastened to make my way there and buy a tube of the pasty white stuff, and once I hit the Mexican sun, I applied it to my skin, sparing myself a wretched sunburn.

The pasty white stuff was a powerful reminder of my father.  Before he died when I was 12, Daddy would cover my skin with something he called zinc oxide.

Daddy was a pharmacist by training, earning a degree in pharmacy from the University of Illinois at the age of 21.  One of my favorite family photos shows Daddy in a chemistry lab at the university, learning what he needed to know to earn that degree.  His first choice was to become a doctor, but because his own father had died during Daddy’s infancy, there was no way he could afford medical school.  An irascible uncle was a pharmacist and somehow pushed Daddy into pharmacy as a less expensive route to helping people via medicine.

Daddy spent years bouncing between pharmacy and retailing, and sometimes he did both.  I treasure a photo of him as a young man standing in front of the drug store he owned on the South Side of Chicago.  When I was growing up, he sometimes worked at a pharmacy and sometimes in other retailing enterprises, but he never abandoned his knowledge of pharmaceuticals.  While working as a pharmacist, he would often bring home new drugs he believed would cure our problems.  One time I especially recall:  Because as a young child I suffered from allergies, Daddy was excited when a brand-new drug came along to help me deal with them, and he brought a bottle of it home for me.

As for preventing sunburn, Daddy would many times take a tube of zinc oxide and apply it to my skin.

One summer or two, I didn’t totally escape a couple of bad sunburns. Daddy must have been distracted just then, and I foolishly exposed my skin to the sun.  He later applied a greasy ointment called butesin picrate to soothe my burn. But I distinctly remember that he used his knowledge of chemistry to get out that tube of zinc oxide whenever he could.

After my pivotal trip to Mexico, sunblocks became much more available.  (I also acquired a number of sunhats to shield my face from the sun.)  But looking back, I wonder about the composition of some of the sunblocks I applied to my skin for decades.  Exactly what was I adding to my chemical burden?

In 2013, the FDA banned the use of the word “sunblock,” stating that it could mislead consumers into thinking that a product was more effective than it really was.  So sunblocks have become sunscreens, but some are more powerful than others.

A compelling reason to use powerful sunscreens?  The ozone layer that protected us in the past has undergone damage in recent years, and there’s scientific concern that more of the sun’s dangerous rays can penetrate that layer, leading to increased damage to our skin.

In recent years, I’ve paid a lot of attention to what’s in the sunscreens I choose.  Some of the chemicals in available sunscreens are now condemned by groups like the Environmental Working Group (EWG) as either ineffective or hazardous to your health. (Please check EWG’s 2018 Sunscreen Guide for well-researched and detailed information regarding sunscreens.)

Let’s note, too, that the state of Hawaii has banned the future use of sunscreens that include one of these chemicals, oxybenzone, because it washes off swimmers’ skin into ocean waters and has been shown to be harmful to coral reefs.  If it’s harming coral, what is it doing to us?

Because I now make the very deliberate choice to avoid using sunscreens harboring suspect chemicals, I use only those sunscreens whose active ingredients include—guess what– zinc oxide.   Sometimes another safe ingredient, titanium dioxide, is added.  The science behind these two mineral (rather than chemical) ingredients?   Both have inorganic particulates that reflect, scatter, and absorb damaging UVA and UVB rays.

Daddy, I think you’d be happy to know that science has acknowledged what you knew all those years ago.  Pasty white zinc oxide still stands tall as one of the very best barriers to repel the sun’s damaging rays.

In a lifetime filled with many setbacks, both physical and professional, my father always took joy in his family.  He showered us with his love, demonstrating that he cared for us in innumerable ways.

Every time I apply a sunscreen based on zinc oxide, I think of you, Daddy.  With love, with respect for your vast knowledge, and with gratitude that you cared so much for us and did everything you could to help us live a healthier life.

 

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Posted in 1950s, August, caring, chemistry, Chicago, Daddy, environment, Environmental Working Group, family, fathers, Food and Drug Administration, Hawaii, health, love, medical research, Mexico, ozone layer, parents, pharmacist, science, skin cancer, sunblocks, sunburn, sunscreens, sunshine, University of Illinois, winter weather, zinc oxide

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The Last Straw(s)

Posted on August 29, 2017 | 1 comment

A crusade against plastic drinking straws?  Huh?

At first glance, it may strike you as frivolous.  But it’s not.  In fact, it’s pretty darned serious.

In California, the city of Berkeley may kick off such a crusade.   In June, the city council directed its staff to research what would be California’s first city ordinance prohibiting the use of plastic drinking straws in bars, restaurants, and coffee shops.

Berkeley is responding to efforts by nonprofit groups like the Surfrider Foundation that want to eliminate a significant source of pollution in our oceans, lakes, and other bodies of water. According to the conservation group Save the Bay, the annual cleanup days held on California beaches have found that plastic straws and stirrers are the sixth most common kind of litter.  If they’re on our beaches, they’re flowing into the San Francisco Bay, into the Pacific Ocean, and ultimately into oceans all over the world.

As City Councilwoman Sophie Hahn, a co-author of the proposal to study the ban, has noted, “They are not biodegradable, and there are alternatives.”

I’ve been told that plastic straws aren’t recyclable, either.  So whenever I find myself using a plastic straw to slurp my drink, I conscientiously separate my waste:  my can of Coke Zero goes into the recycling bin; my plastic straw goes into the landfill bin.  This is nuts.  Banning plastic straws in favor of paper ones is the answer.

Realistically, it may be a tough fight to ban plastic straws because business interests (like the Monster Straw Co. in Laguna Beach) want to keep making and selling them.  And business owners claim that they’re more cost-effective, leading customers to prefer them.  As Monster’s founder and owner, Natalie Buketov, told the SF Chronicle, “right now the public wants cheap plastic straws.”

Berkeley could vote on a ban by early 2018.

On the restaurant front, some chefs would like to see the end of plastic straws.  Spearheading a growing movement to steer eateries away from serving straws is Marcel Vigneron, owner-chef of Wolf Restaurant on Melrose Avenue in L.A.  Vigneron, who’s appeared on TV’s “Top Chef” and “Iron Chef,” is also an enthusiastic surfer, and he’s seen the impact of straw-pollution on the beaches and marine wildlife.  He likes the moniker “Straws Suck” to promote his effort to move away from straws, especially the play on words:  “You actually use straws to suck, and they suck because they pollute the oceans,” he told CBS in July.

Vigneron added that if a customer wants a straw, his restaurant has them.  But servers ask customers whether they want a straw instead of automatically putting them into customers’ drinks.  He notes that every day, 500 million straws are used in the U.S., and they could “fill up 127 school buses.”  He wants to change all that.

Drinking straws have a long history.  Their origins were apparently actual straw, or other straw-like grasses and plants.  The first paper straw, made from paper coated with paraffin wax, was patented in 1888 by Marvin Stone, who didn’t like the flavor of a rye grass straw added to his mint julep.  The “bendy” paper straw was patented in 1937.  But the plastic straw took off, along with many other plastic innovations, in the 1960s, and nowadays they’re difficult to avoid.

Campaigns like Surfrider’s have taken off because of mounting concern with plastic pollution.  Surfrider, which has also campaigned against other threats to our oceans, like plastic bags and cigarette butts, supports the “Straws Suck” effort, and according to author David Suzuki, Bacardi has joined with Surfrider in the movement to ban plastic straws.

Our neighbors to the north have already leaped ahead of California.  The town of Tofino in British Columbia claims that it mounted the very first “Straws Suck” campaign in 2016.  By Earth Day in April that year, almost every local business had banned plastic straws.  A fascinating story describing this effort appeared in the Vancouver Sun on April 22, 2016.

All of us in the U.S., indeed the world, need to pay attention to what plastic is doing to our environment.  “At the current rate, we are really headed toward a plastic planet,” according to the author of a study reported in the journal Science Advances, reported by AP in July.  Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at UC Santa Barbara, noted that there’s enough discarded plastic to bury Manhattan under more than 2 miles of trash.

Geyer used the plastics industry’s own data to find that the amount of plastics made and thrown out is accelerating.  In 2015, the world created more than twice as much as it made in 1998.

The plastics industry has fought back, relying on the standard of cost-effectiveness.  It claims that alternatives to plastic, like glass, paper, or aluminum, would require more energy to produce.  But even if that’s true, the energy difference in the case of items like drinking straws would probably be minimal.  If we substitute paper straws for plastic ones, the cost difference would likely be negligible, while the difference for our environment—eliminating all those plastic straws floating around in our waterways–could be significant.

Aside from city bans and eco-conscious restaurateurs, we need to challenge entities like Starbucks.  The mega-coffee-company and coffeehouse-chain prominently offers, even flaunts, brightly-colored plastic straws for customers sipping its cold drinks.  What’s worse:  they happily sell them to others!  Just check out the Starbucks straws for sale on Amazon.com.  Knowing what we know about plastic pollution, I think Starbucks’s choice to further pollute our environment by selling its plastic straws on the Internet is unforgivable.

At the end of the day, isn’t this really the last straw?

 

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Posted in Associated Press, California, dining, drinking straws, environment, health, law, opinion pieces, plastic pollution, politics, restaurants, science

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Down and Hot in Paris and London (with apologies to George Orwell) Part II

Posted on November 6, 2014 | Leave a comment

PART II

As I noted at the end of Part I of this post, my family and I—traveling in France and the U.K. during the summer of 1995–departed Paris and headed for Normandy in our rented Peugeot. Leaving Paris (where we’d been “down and hot”), we hoped for cooler weather in northern France.

But, although Normandy was not as oppressive as Paris, we still encountered heat and humidity almost everywhere we went. Our stay in the beautiful city of Rouen was delightful. But our side trip to Giverny, where we explored Monet’s home and gardens, including the famed water-lily pond, was more ordeal than delight, the sun beating down on us as we tried to admire the brilliant flowers.

From Giverny, we drove to see what remained of a 12th-century castle, Chateau-Gaillard Les Andelys. Meredith was determined to hike around the ruins, and the rest of us decided to join her. But it soon became clear that to see the crumbling chateau walls up close, we had to walk down a steep hill, then climb another one, with no shade anywhere. Leslie and I waited in the car in a shady parking spot, content to see the disintegrating walls from a distance, till Herb and Meredith returned, exhausted.

The day we traveled to Honfleur, an exquisite seaside town, and the twin resorts of Deauville and Trouville, we ran into a steady rain. The rain and cooler temperatures were welcome, but they literally dampened our seaside visit. Was it asking too much to have a single day of lower temperatures without any rain?

The sun returned the next day as we made our way to the charming town of Avranches. We checked into our hotel, next door to a painstakingly manicured Jardin des Plantes, before crossing the bay to Mont-St-Michel to see the abbey built there centuries ago. We propelled ourselves, sweating, up 357 stairs to join an English-language tour of the fantastic structure. Our perky tour guide, a young Frenchwoman who wore 501 Levi’s with a 25-inch waist (I peeked at the label) didn’t seem the least bit affected by the heat, but everyone else in the tour group looked about to faint as she energetically herded us through the abbey’s three storeys.

Our daily routine was becoming depressingly familiar. Every morning, we rose to another day of brilliant sunshine. We then proceeded to rummage through our bags for any lightweight clothing that was still halfway clean.

Next, we applied generous amounts of 1990s-type sunblock to protect our skins from the torrid summer sun. Coating ourselves with the greasy, unpleasant-smelling stuff every morning was distasteful, but we forced ourselves to do it anyway. We did not want to resemble some of the English tourists we saw at the seaside resort of St. Malo in Brittany–as red as freshly-boiled lobsters, walking gingerly to avoid unnecessary pain. I chose sunblock instead, thank you very much.

Our morning ritual included filling our plastic water bottles with the coldest water we could find. Back home, we weren’t reliant on plastic water bottles. But from our first day in Paris, we began buying small plastic bottles of Evian, Volvic, or one of their competitors in the mineral-water business, then refilling them for a couple of days before we tossed them and bought replacements. Those water bottles saved us from dehydration and possible heat stroke. Sometimes we were so hot we defied extreme thirst to pour the water over our heads and arms instead.

The water bottle, extra sunblock, maps, cameras, and other gear were stashed in the tote bags we carried around. Early on, my daughters and I dumped our heavy tote bags from home and opted for virtually weightless cotton bags. These flimsy cotton bags were sold throughout France—I’d never seen them in the U.S.–and mine was a lifesaver.

Before setting out, we added the final touch: our visors. Some kind of headgear–the lighter, the better–was an absolute necessity to deflect the sun’s rays. Chaos reigned one morning when Meredith couldn’t find her only visor. Calm was ultimately restored when, searching through my bags, I found the extra one I’d brought along. Meredith wasn’t crazy about my spare, but it kept her from expiring till we found hers buried in the Peugeot’s trunk.

After ten days in France, we departed for England, hoping to find cooler temperatures there.

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Posted in environment, family, hot-weather travel, Mont-St-Michel, Normandy, Paris, travel

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Down and Hot in Paris and London (with apologies to George Orwell)

Posted on November 5, 2014 | Leave a comment

This post is something of a departure from my earlier ones. It’s the record of a family trip to Paris, London, and elsewhere in France and the U.K. during the summer of 1995. My family that summer included my husband Herb; our two college-aged daughters, Meredith and Leslie; and me. Our home was in a suburb of Chicago.

I originally drafted this piece in 1995, shortly after we returned from our trip. I focused on how we survived the intense heat we’d encountered. Now, nearly 20 years later, the cities we visited may respond to hot weather differently than they did back then. But my post may nevertheless serve as a cautionary tale for anyone traveling anywhere during hot weather, even today.

Please don’t conclude that this trip was a disaster. It wasn’t! Even though we continually confronted the challenges of hot-weather travel, we nevertheless had a marvelous time. We laughed through all of our travails and mishaps, and they quickly became family legends that we’ve treasured ever since.

Because of its overall length, I’ve divided it into four separate posts, beginning with Part I.

PART I

In a sweltering summer when temperatures in Chicago soared to record-breaking highs, we took off for Paris and London. When Herb and I made our travel plans, it seemed like a great idea. For one thing, Northern Europe almost never had the high summer temperatures we usually had in Chicago. Besides, our older daughter, Meredith, was spending the summer doing research in Paris. What better excuse for the rest of us to fly there, meet up with her, then travel together in France and the U.K.?

In May, we booked our airline tickets, planning to depart for Paris in mid-July. By June, I began to get glimmers that all was not well. Meredith was reporting unusually hot weather in Paris, and media dispatches from Wimbledon noted London temperatures in the 90s.

It can’t last, I thought. This is freakish weather for Paris and London, and by the time we get there, things will have cooled off.

But by the time we got there, it was just as hot.

Younger daughter Leslie, Herb, and I arrived in Paris early Friday morning and headed for the taxi stand at Orly Airport. The air was shimmering with heat–at 8 a.m.–and we were grateful to grab a taxi with air-conditioning. We arrived at our modest hotel near the Luxembourg Gardens and found our chambre, a good-sized room with one double bed and two twins. Heavy curtains on the French windows were fending off the sun, but when we opened them to see our view, the sun hit the room, and the already-high temperature shot up even more. We rushed to close the curtains. Then, exhausted from our trip, we collapsed on our sagging mattresses.

Meredith met up with us later that morning, and we all set out for the Luxembourg Gardens, where we found chairs in a shady spot and pondered how to spend the rest of the day. A museum would surely be cool; protecting all that priceless artwork required air-conditioning. We couldn’t face the cavernous Louvre, so we headed for the Musée d’Orsay.

Hot and sleep-deprived, we dragged ourselves up the Boulevard St-Michel to the Metro, and took a sizzling subway car to the museum. Surprise! Once inside, having paid a hefty entrance fee, we were shocked to find the air-conditioning barely functioning. Weren’t Parisians worried about all those precious Monets, Manets, and Van Goghs?

We forced ourselves to look at a few galleries but eventually collapsed in some comfy wicker chairs, where we dozed off for the next half-hour. Other museum-goers stared, but we were too hot and sleepy to care. We finally made our way to the museum café, where we ate a light lunch and consumed a large quantity of liquid refreshment.

After searching for an air-conditioned restaurant near our hotel–and finding none–we dined outside on the Rue Soufflot and headed for bed, only to discover another problem: mosquitoes! Our beautiful French windows had no screens, and if we opened the windows with the lights on, mosquitoes attacked us from every direction. We decided to leave the windows closed till it was time to turn out the lights.

Once we turned off the lights and opened the windows, a delicious breeze entered the room, cooling us off for the night. But the mosquitoes still targeted us, even in the dark, and traffic noise kept us from having a good night’s sleep.

The next morning, we awoke to a rainy Paris sky. In my lifetime of traveling, I’d never before been so happy to see rain! The gray sky meant lower temperatures, and we happily set out for another museum (the Musée d’Art Moderne, then featuring an impressive exhibit of Chagall paintings) without the threat of soaring temperatures and a merciless sun.

But as the day progressed, things got a lot steamier, and we decided to leave Paris a day earlier than planned. We would pick up our rental car and head for Rouen one day sooner. After dinner on the Rue du Pot de Fer, a pedestrian street a few steps from the busy Rue Mouffetard, we walked back to our hotel, prepared to be unwilling mosquito-targets one more night.

By now, we were all covered with bites, and the torment of itching had begun. Applying hydrocortisone cream helped, but not nearly enough. Meredith bought a more powerful French ointment formulated to ease insect bites, so we tried that, too. But those Parisian bugs were potent, and we proceeded to scratch their bites for days. (The bites on our feet created a special torment. Encased in heavy-duty athletic shoes–the better to walk in, my dear–our feet were not only piping-hot but also covered with bites that never stopped itching!)

The next morning dawned sunny but cooler. Miraculous! Did we really want to leave Paris a day early? Taking advantage of the cooler air, we set out on foot for the Marais, by way of the bouquinistes along the Seine, the Ile de la Cité, and the Ile St-Louis. By the time we arrived at the Rue des Rosiers, where we consumed kosher panini, the sun had become more intense, and the air was growing hot.

At the Musée Carnavalet, the displays of Parisian history and culture were fascinating, but the increasing heat and the enormous collection finally wore us down. Drained of energy, we spent the next hour sitting in the shade, zombie-like, in a small park just outside the museum.

Later, we walked to the Place des Vosges, where we sat for a while once again in the shade. The search for shade had become a rallying cry that resounded throughout the trip. “Shade!” I would shout, and the rest of our little group would hurry after me to reach the nearest patch of shade.

After another excellent dinner on the Rue du Pot de Fer, enjoying the sensory delights of a delicious breeze, I wondered whether we were right to leave Paris one day early. But the next morning, the sun was blazing with a vengeance, and all of us were grateful to pile into our rented Peugeot and head north to Normandy, where cooler temperatures awaited–or so we hoped!

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Posted in Chicago, cosmetics, dining, environment, family, fashion, food, gender equality, health, hot-weather travel, indoor tanning, lipstick, travel

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What Shall We Do About Plastic Bags?

Posted on April 30, 2014 | 1 comment

The fate of plastic bags is up in the air. While we ponder their future, they’re accumulating by the millions in countless landfills (or worse, in our oceans).

Before plastic bags existed, people wrapped things in paper bags (generally brown ones). My mother stuffed our sandwiches into waxed paper bags (which didn’t work very well to keep them fresh). Retail stores offered their own paper bags featuring stores’ logos. And the paper shopping bag eventually made its appearance.

When plastic bags first came on the scene in a big way in the 1960s, they were a revelation. They were lightweight and could be folded inside your purse or briefcase, allowing you to reuse them. They kept wet things from getting everything else wet. They were useful for wrapping smelly garbage (and, eventually, smelly diapers).

Once I discovered the virtues of plastic bags, I began saving them, and saving them, and saving them. I still do. My deplorable status as a “saver” has led to a huge stash of colorful plastic bags. I justify it by constantly reusing them.

Despite their many virtues, plastic bags have become a menace, and the movement to ban plastic bags is gaining steam. San Francisco led the way in 2007 as the first city to ban them. Initially banning them at chain grocery stores and drugstores, SF extended the ban to all retail stores and restaurants in 2012.

Since 2007, plastic bags have been banned in nearly 100 municipalities in the state of California, and right now Los Angeles is the largest city in the country to enforce the ban. According a recent article in The New York Times, more than 150 communities across the U.S. have embraced some sort of bag ordinance. These include cities like Honolulu, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Even New York City is moving—slowly–towards a ban. In March the city council introduced legislation that would charge customers a fee for both plastic and paper bags at most city stores.

Wherever plastic bags are currently banned, paper bags are available for a small fee. (Most retailers in San Francisco now charge 10 cents.) So here in SF, we rely more and more on paper bags. And that’s OK. They tend to be biodegradable and recyclable, and many San Franciscans use them to store items destined for recycling until we can get to a bin.

We also use even sturdier reusable tote bags in bright patterns and colors. My favorites are large tote bags made from recycled plastic bottles, like those featuring color reproductions of classic Audubon prints, available for a donation to the National Audubon Society.

But plastic bags still offer some distinct advantages. They’re great repositories of smelly wet garbage, they don’t fall apart in the rain, and they can be repurposed as trash-can liners and lunch bags. Banning them completely would mean saying goodbye to all that.

But the winds of social change are blowing through California, where some legislators are now vigorously proposing a total ban on single-use plastic bags throughout the state. A similar statewide ban has been proposed before. But the plastics industry, with millions of dollars to spend on lobbying lawmakers, has so far succeeded in quashing these efforts.

The Times reports that one of the largest manufacturers of plastic bags, Hilex Poly, spent more than $1 million in California lobbying against a 2010 effort that, not surprisingly, failed. According to The Times, this South Carolina firm later donated to every Democrat in the California Senate who joined Republicans to defeat another bill proposed in 2013.

This year support for a statewide ban has new momentum. The Los Angeles Times has endorsed it, and several legislators who opposed the bill last year have made a U-turn and announced their support.

Another manufacturer has even jumped on the bandwagon. Command Packaging has started increasing its production of heavy-duty reusable bags, made from recycled agricultural plastic, and now supports the current bill. The California bill would allow stores to offer these more durable plastic bags—for a fee–alongside paper ones.

Not surprisingly, environmental groups are in hot pursuit of the ban. The California League of Conservation Voters recently recited the grim statistics: Californians still use an astonishing 20 billion plastic bags every year. Because they aren’t usually recycled, they contribute to marine pollution as well as urban pollution. California has a long coastline, and many of its rivers and streams lead right into bays like San Francisco Bay and the ocean. CLCV estimates that most plastic bags ultimately end up in the ocean, where 60 to 80% of all marine debris is plastic. Captain Paul Watson, executive director of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, estimates that 7 million tons of plastic are currently floating in our oceans.

The result is horrific. Birds, fish, and animals like sea otters drown, suffocate, or are strangled by plastic bags. Sea turtles, whose diet is largely made of up jellyfish, frequently mistake plastic bags for their favorite food and die when they consume them.

The long-term solution to plastic bags may lie in composting. In San Francisco, where composting of food scraps and items like food-soiled paper plates and cups has been mandatory since 2009, we can purchase biodegradable plastic bags in which to stuff our compost. As the rest of the country moves toward composting, this kind of bag will become more readily available, and the problem of non-biodegradable plastic bags will largely disappear. Unfortunately, the increasing use of composting won’t happen very soon.

I strongly support the proposed statewide ban in California–although I admit it’s easy for me to support it, thanks to the immense supply of plastic bags lurking in my closet. Because of the new momentum favoring a ban, plastic bags appear to be on the endangered list, at least in California. And let’s face it, once it happens in California, it will begin to happen elsewhere in the U.S. Someday our great-grandchildren will gaze in wonder at the colorful plastic bags displayed for their amusement in the museums of the future.

But in the meantime, are there are any new uses for plastic bags that would justify their continued existence?

A Nigerian artist has come up with one. Ifeoma Anyeaji, a Nigerian artist visiting at the Godown Art Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, was the focus of a profile in the Daily Nation last September. (The Daily Nation is an independent and influential Kenyan newspaper headquartered in Nairobi.) According to a Lonely Planet publication on Kenya, the Godown Art Centre is “a hub for Nairobi’s burgeoning arts scene.”

Once she arrived there, Anyeaji (known as Ify) began collecting discarded plastic bags. As a visual artist, she could use commonly used media like oil and acrylic. But she chose to work with plastic bags and bottles to promote the reusability of discarded materials. She sees plastic bags as “a global issue,” polluting the environment, “and so I thought of a way to make use of them.” Her technique? Threading and weaving the bags, ultimately creating colorful structures. This technique resembles the traditional hair-braiding and fabric warp-weft weaving popular in Nigeria. As a little girl, Ify was good at threading, the art of weaving hair with threads, “and this is the technique I wanted to incorporate into my work.”

Preparing the bags isn’t simple. After collecting the bags, Ify cleans and shreds them. Then she wraps them into strings, like ropes, and works them into intricate patterns. The patterns are then shaped into structures, including furniture, some of which is functional as well as works of art.

Ify sees herself in a broader context, noting that the world is mainly composed of recycled ideas, where one concept is borrowed and then embellished to be used elsewhere. Her view of the art world, and of herself as part of it, may have been influenced by her time studying in the U.S. After receiving her degree in painting at the University of Benin in Nigeria, she studied art at Washington University in St. Louis, receiving a graduate degree in environmental sculpture.

So…until we see the total demise of the single-use plastic bag, we can treasure creative people like Ify and hope that these bags will be repurposed, becoming useful and perhaps even beautiful objects. Unfortunately, Ify will almost certainly have an ample supply for many years to come.

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Posted in environment, opinion pieces, politics, San Francisco

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